Hanford: No money to top radio active waste flowing into the Columbia River

A
member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently informed
the public that radioactive waste from the decommissioned Hanford
nuclear power plant is ‘flowing freely’ into the Columbia river.

The
mighty Columbia river is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest
region of America, flowing down from Canada, winding through eastern
Washington state and along the border between Oregon, ultimately
moving through downtown Portland and into the Pacific. The Hanford
site, located near Kennewick, WA is up river from a million or so
people, not to mention the wildlife.

Constructed
in the 1940’s as part of the Manhattan Project, the plant was
decommissioned after the Cold War, leaving behind some 53
million gallons of high level radioactive waste.
Proposed as a Superfund site in 1988, Hanford is an uncontrollable
ecological and public health disaster.

A
recent review of the site concluded that contaminated ground water is
contaminating the Columbia.

The
announcement came as part of a five-year review of cleanup measures
taken at the Superfund site. Officials with the EPA and the
Department of Energy said at a meeting Wednesday that the review
showed most of the cleanup actions at Hanford were properly
“protective,” meaning the public was shielded from the worst of
the site’s estimated 500 million gallons of potentially radioactive
waste.

Radioactive
sludge in shuttered reactors, contaminated soil in landfill sites and
equipment that was once used to refine the uranium that fueled the
nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki were all properly contained,
according to the report.

But
there was a glaring exception: groundwater contaminated with
hexavalent chromium and strontium-90 was still flowing into the
nearby Columbia River, according to a presentation from Mike Cline,
director of the Department of Energy’s Soil & Groundwater
Division.

“Contaminated
in-area groundwater is still flowing freely into the Columbia,” EPA
Project Manager Dennis Faulk told members of the board.” [Source]

Remarkably,
there are not enough funds at present for necessary actions to stop
the leakage, especially in the face of impending environmental cuts
by the Trump administration.

“We
don’t have enough funding as it is to do the work that needs to be
done,” said Randy Bradbury, spokesman for the Washington state
Department of Ecology’s Hanford Nuclear Waste program. “So the
cuts are very concerning.” [Source]

Final
Thoughts

Ultimately,
this insanity highlights the obvious problem with nuclear power that
no one who profits from this sector of the energy industry will talk
about: nuclear power is impossible for us to contain. And in a nation
with unlimited
funds for war materials and prison
complexes,
it’s an indictment of our values that we don’t have the resources
or the will to protect our land and our people from disasters like
this.